Seawater is an environment in which numerous organisms evolve, some with great potential for biotechnology. In recent years, however, many scientists have moved away from the assumption that the origin of life was in pools of water, and instead propose life on Earth probably originated in accumulations of warm, nutrient-rich mud. This mud, also called a peloid , has formed over many years through various processes and is a rich source of living organisms that, due to their adaptation to this unique environment, produce a wide variety of primary and secondary metabolites with numerous and diverse activities, including anti-cancer, anti-inflammatory, antiviral, and immunomodulatory ones.
This research aimed to characterize both prokaryotic and eukaryotic contribution to peloid . It also reports the living microorganism part of the peloid attributed healing properties by screening for bioactive compounds produced by microorganisms making up the peloid ecosystem. This was accomplished by high-throughput mass spectrometry coupled with bioinformatics pipeline based on DEREPLICATOR+ (Mohimani, H. et al. 2018) allowing for screening of thousands of available natural products from COCONUT database (Sorokina et al. 2021).
The results of research have been accepted for publication in Frontiers in Marine Science, under the title: “Bioprospecting for microorganisms in peloids - extreme environment known for its healing properties ” by Vadlja et al. 2022.